Afghanistan
My angst over Afghanistan grows, but I still think any president would have done what Biden did.
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It’s been quite a week. My angst over Afghanistan grows, but I still think any president would have done what Biden did — finish the withdrawal that Trump negotiated (it’s also important to note that the American people wanted us out too) — and I also believe that all hell would have broken loose, regardless of who finally finished Trump’s withdrawal. In large part, because any president would have received the same intelligence briefings Biden got — no one thought Kabul, and the entire country, would fall this quickly.
It’s also important to note something that I did not fully appreciate until this week. Biden came into office with only 2,500 US troops remaining in Afghanistan — several hundred of them at the US embassy, and most of the rest at Bagram Air Base. Trump had already drawn down our troop levels from 13,000 to 2,500 before Biden took over. So Biden inherited a situation in which the US was already outgunned by the Taliban.
But there was another problem Biden was facing in Afghanistan. Not only was the US down to only 2,5000 troops. But the Taliban was newly-empowered, and the strongest they’d been since the US destroyed them twenty years ago. Trump’s peace deal said that the US and the Taliban would stop fighting each other — provided the US left Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — while the US left the Taliban to continue attacking the Afghan army, which they did quite effectively. Also, Trump agreed to seek the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, who were in fact released. At the same time, Trump withdrew our troops. Biden was left with a conundrum. Abide by Trump’s agreement, and leave, knowing that eventually Afghanistan would fall; or surge more troops back into Afghanistan and reignite the twenty-year-old war, knowing that the American people — and the Republicans — would flip. Biden wasn’t elected to expand the war in Afghanistan. He ran, as did Trump, on ending it.
I don’t like what’s happening in Afghanistan. I know there’s nothing more we could have done, but I still feel like we let them down, irrational as it may be. (Having said that, we did let down the Afghans who worked with the US military. More of them have now been evacuated, but I fear we won’t get them all. That’s a travesty and a betrayal.) But we lost this war — and more importantly, the Afghan government and Afghan army lost this war — long ago. At some point, we had to either agree to a permanent US occupying force propping up a failed state, or we had to leave, knowing all hell would break loose. Biden, Trump and a majority of the American people chose the latter.
PS As an aside, Don Winslow just did a video noting that Trump bragged last year that he had defeated ISIS “100%.” In fact, he didn’t. It was ISIS that did the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, killing 13 Americans and dozens of Afghans.
Oh, and be sure to check out Trump’s new interview about 9/11, in which he claims that Osama bin Laden wasn’t that big a deal.
I’ll do a week in review later this weekend, including the weekly funnies. Have a great weekend. JOHN
Don Winslow is great! A really good writer too. I feel great about Afghanistan. We are FINALLY leaving a country the US should never have occupied for a minute. We won the war 20 years ago, easily. But occupying the country was a huge mistake. I think the comparison you guys mentioned on your podcast of Dunkirk is very apt. 110,000 people and counting? That's remarkable. While I know Trump would have bungled the withdrawal a hundred different ways, I'll happily pretend it would have been no more or less chaotic if we left two years ago or ten years ago. Leaving is messy. And long long overdue. Thank God Biden won't let a handful of attacks divert him from the task at hand: getting the hell out of there.